Puppy journey with some comments

[doglover]

I have a Fujitsu E7010 with 512 MB RAM and Belkin PCMCIA wifi card, and Puppy just works. Finds the card without having to do anything, and connects to router easily with WPA2 password, works every time, with every Ubuntu Puppy version. Also runs about as fast as can be hoped given limited RAM. So thanks for that.

I currently have multiple recent versions of Puppy all set up on the same partition using frugal installs. Having now installed multiple versions, I can definitely see the advantage and ease of the frugal installs.

I wanted to try the Slackware puppy flavors but they do not detect the card.

Previously I had a multiboot setup with Windows XP (which I had stopped using a while back but left on), Mint xfce 15, and Puppy Tahr 6.0.5. I booted the Tahr from CD but had sfs and save files on the hard drive. The Mint 15 booted from hard drive with GRUB2.

Both Mint 15 and Tahr 6 browsers no longer worked for many websites, so decided that needed to move on and upgrade.
Part of my hesitation to install Puppy was that I didn't want to go from GRUB2 to legacy GRUB. I knew the GRUB2 syntax and was comfortable playing with it. Not nearly as facile with the legacy GRUB syntax.
So, I tried a full install (not frugal) of one of the Puppies, I believe it was Xenial 7.5 but not 100% sure, with intent to install bootloader to the partition boot record and modify the GRUB2 manually. I've done that dozens of times with various Ubuntu flavors, never had a problem. Well, didn't go well with the Puppy install probably due to unfamiliarity with the installer, in addition to an error that the installer threw, ended up with an unbootable system. Discovered using GRUB Rescue mode that the installer went ahead and installed Legacy GRUB but never created a /boot/grub directory probably because of the error. So wouldn't boot, GRUB couldn't find normal.mod (because it didn't exist on the newly targeted boot drive) and just stopped.

So, since GRUB2 no longer worked, decided to go ahead with the frugal installs and now am super happy with multiple Puppy versions running well under GRUB legacy with no major issues. Well, maybe one that I will discuss in future email.

So, thanks for Puppy. Running very well on my old laptop with PCMCIA card.
Best,
IMF

[Geek3579]

I'm glad you are happy with the current installations. In contrast, I struggled with legacy boot and installer programs for a couple of years until I learnt how to do GRUB2 menu scripts using the UUID for the drive/partition (especially with USB installations). Never looked back.

For others reading this who may be hesitant to lose their Windows OS while installing puppy, Stickpup allows one to JUST install on a USB with no risk to the main OS/drive.

I have also recently tried the LICK installer in a situation where I needed to keep the windows installation intact and it worked both easily and safely. And I could subsequently easily add other frugal Puppys following the first installation.

I am always surprised by the various ways that Puppy users / Forum members boot their Puppies, which attests to its flexibility and usefulness in a myriad of hardware situations.